This invention is in the field of rotary shaft seals and is more particularly directed to a seal gland capable of usage with a variety of rotary mechanical shaft seals of different sizes and shapes.
A wide variety of devices such as pumps, compressors and the like employ rotary shafts supported for rotation in a housing in which pressurized liquid engages the shaft on the interior of the housing and tends to leak outwardly along the shaft to the exterior of the housing. Such leakage is obviously undesirable for a variety of reasons such as environmental contamination where the liquid is a hazardous chemical, cost of the lost liquid, cleanup costs and maintenance costs and the loss of energy resulting from such leakage. A common and well-known expedient for reducing leakage around a shaft is that of providing a stuffing box surrounding the shaft with packed stuffing material being held in contact with the shaft. Improvements over the stuffing box concept have included rotary mechanical seals which basically consist of an annular rotary seal member fixed to the shaft for rotation therewith and having a radial surface engageable with a radial surface of a fixed annular seal member held in position against the rotary seal by a gland member machined to provide the necessary geometry and spacing for effecting a satisfactory contact between the contacting radial surfaces of the rotary annular seal member and the fixed annular seal member. Such a conventional gland construction is illustrated by element 36 in FIG. 2 of the prior Peet U.S. Pat. No. 3,961,799. Additionally, the Peet patent also illustrates other differently shaped gland members 26.sub.1, 26.sub.2, and 26.sub.3, all of which share in common the fact that they can only be used with a rotary shaft of a given diameter and are not usable in other devices having shafts of different diameters. While the devices illustrated in the Peet patent represent an advancement over the prior art, they suffer from the disadvantage that they consume a substantial amount of space axially along the length of the shaft with which they are associated by virtue of the fact that the sealing system disclosed in the Peet patent necessarily requires an adapter ring 46 or 94 which necessarily increases the axial length of the space in which the sealing components must be located. Thus, not only is the system of the Peet patent incapable of using the same gland for different sizes of shafts, it also suffers from the disadvantage of requiring a substantial amount of axial space along the length of the shaft and is therefore unusable with apparatus in which such space is not available. Thus, an essential requirement of the Peet system is the employment of the adapter rings 46, 94 for positioning between the gland member and a specially designed universal fixed sealing member such as members 44, 44', 80 and 98 as illustrated in the Peet patent. The present universal gland member invention avoids the need for using such specially designed seal members, eliminates the need for adapter rings and also permits the usage of the universal gland member with a wide variety of mechanical seal constructions and different shaft sizes.